In the operation of buildings such as hotels, apartments, condominiums, office buildings, and other structures in which rooms exist and where persons such as residents, visitors or others may be present, there are many rooms which at any given moment may or may not be occupied, may or may not require cleaning, and may or may not require heating or cooling. In addition all such rooms should be monitored for smoke and fire.
The present description will deal with a hotel as a typical application of the invention. However the invention is applicable to other buildings and structures containing a number of separate rooms.
In the past, some of the functions referred to above have been carried out in hotels by the hotel staff, or by reference to an accounting computer recording check-outs and check-ins, and by the use of door signs such as "Do Not Disturb". Some of the functions have been carried out by essentially independent systems, such as fire alarm systems, air conditioning systems, and the like.
Past methods of monitoring and carrying out the above functions are well known to be a cause of problems. For example, guests frequently forget either to hang a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door when it is required, or to remove the sign when they leave. Hence cleaning staff pay little attention to such signs and commonly disturb hotel guests even where the signs are in use.
In addition, the present system of communicating to a hotel front desk that a room is vacant, clean, inspected and ready to rent requires a number of manual inputs which take considerable time to receive and process and which are not always received. Therefore guests wishing to check-in must often wait, even though clean rooms may be available.
A further problem is that in many cases, rooms have been deficiently cleaned but the hotel staff does not notice this until a guest has rented the room and then complains. It is then necessary to find the guest another room and to send cleaning staff to the first room. This wastes the time of the hotel staff and causes guest dissatisfaction.
A further consideration is that in most buildings, heating and cooling of rooms is a major expense. When a room is unoccupied, or when the guest has left for a period of time, it is unnecessary to supply full heating or cooling. However no satisfactory system exists for monitoring the presence or absence of a guest and setting back the room temperature in a satisfactory way when a guest is absent from the room.
A further problem area relates to smoke and fire detection systems. While smoke and fire detectors are widely used, they are in practice wired to a central fire detector panel as a "stand alone" system which does not provide other information. With such systems fire fighters do not know which rooms are actually occupied at the time, in order to remove guests from those rooms. The only information which a hotel can provide is which rooms have been let and which have not. Therefore fire fighters must commonly break down all the doors of all rooms in the fire zone to see whether a person is actually there. This wastes critical time.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a room monitoring and control system which will continuously receive and update a variety of different information from each room and report it to a central computer, which can then be monitored by the staff for such information as they require at any moment. In this way the facility will be operated with greater efficiency, so that it can earn more money, create greater comfort and greater safety, save on heating and air conditioning costs, and reduce administrative costs.